Evidence of meeting #14 for Canadian Heritage in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was community.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Editor and Publisher, Canadian Punjabi Post Inc.
I have a Canadian Punjabi Post website. It gets updated every half-hour or hour. It covers all the breaking news in every section. I have Canadian sections, GTA sections, and world sections, and then the India or Punjab sections.
Liberal
Dan Vandal Liberal Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB
We've seen in our delegations a trend across the country of less people reading newspapers and more young people going online to get their information. Do you have information on your demographics? Who reads your newspaper? Also, are young people migrating towards digital?
Associate Editor, Canadian Punjabi Post Inc.
As we said in our presentation as well, the younger generation does not have a handle on the language itself, so it's not of interest to them. Even the younger immigrants who come from back home tend to be more tech savvy. Our readership is primarily people who are aged thirty plus, but as our friend Yuri said, it is the elderly and seniors who are more interested, and they have, I would say, a keen interest in the political. They are the ones who influence the families on political decisions. Our readership ranges from very few in their thirties to the plus-thirties, the forties, and the fifties.
Liberal
Dan Vandal Liberal Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB
What sort of viewership do you have on digital, on the Internet?
Associate Editor, Canadian Punjabi Post Inc.
As Jagdish said, as it comes, we post our news on our website and on Facebook. We have 25,000 followers on Facebook, so that gets out pretty fast.
Editor and Publisher, Canadian Punjabi Post Inc.
There's another thing I want to say. This the only media outlet that invests more in Canadian content. Many times I have seen the Punjabi language newspapers from British Columbia using the same Canadian content I publish in my paper. Also, many radio program hosts and news readers take the news from this website and this newspaper.
Editor and Publisher, Canadian Punjabi Post Inc.
It's within the community. There are many weekly newspapers. There were two daily newspapers in the Punjabi language. They were shut down and have become weekly now. There are other weekly newspapers, plus radio programs and TV channels.
Now there's also the IPTV box. In the last two weeks, about five or six daily 24-7 TV channels have started in the Punjabi language here in the greater Toronto area. Whenever we publish ads in our paper, they go after those business people. They tell them that they will promote them on TV and they tell them how much it will cost them. Of course, the IPTV box doesn't cost much. It has a much lower cost than printing a newspaper, so that is our competition.
Liberal
Dan Vandal Liberal Saint Boniface—Saint Vital, MB
You mentioned that many radio stations are popping up regularly that are of concern to you. Can you say more about that?
Editor and Publisher, Canadian Punjabi Post Inc.
The concept of the radio program is totally different in the Punjabi community. There are only a couple of people who own the 24-hour channels. Others own just two-hour or one-hour slots. I own only a two-hour slot on someone else's radio program. About 70 or 80 people own these half-hour, one-hour, two-hour, or weekend-hour slots on the radio channels. They have their own ideologies and their own way of covering the stories. It's very hard to create an inventory of these radio programs.
Editor and Publisher, Canadian Punjabi Post Inc.
As I said in my presentation, no. As I said, to be one step ahead of other people, to get the attention of the community, and to have more listeners and viewers, they do bring a lot of controversial things onto their radio programs. There is lack of professionalism. They start their radio programs just to.... There are many people who think it's better than working in a factory or driving a truck or a taxi to start a one-hour radio program, to have a journalist from India and just pay him $200 a month to get the coverage from India, and to just do the marketing and make money from the marketing.
Liberal
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
Thank you very much.
Mr. Bilinsky, you serve the Ukrainian community, which is an interesting study, because there have been multi-generational waves of immigration. You have the folks who trace their roots to those seeking economic opportunity around the start of the 20th century or the late 19th century. We have a couple of waves of immigration related to the time of the revolution in World War II, and now we have a new wave of post-1991 immigration.
You have new immigrants and people who trace their family to old immigrants. How does that diverse set of audiences contribute to your readership?
Managing Editor, New Pathway Media Group
Our publication is bilingual, so we cover basically all those waves of immigration and all those generations. Some other Ukrainian news outlets and media tend to be more Ukrainian-language or English-language outlets, so they cover more specific parts of the community.
From our standpoint, we find that it's really worth covering all the groups to actually bring them together, to create an economic synergy for ourselves, but also to try to bring the community together. Obviously, for the reason that different languages are preferred and spoken by different groups, they tend to become detached from one another and from other groups. To actually be able to discuss the same issues with all the groups, we need to be bilingual. It does create some limitations, because the community is not probably as big, obviously, as the wider population. When people prefer one language to the other, it sometimes limits the market for us in some cases.
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
It's a geographically dispersed population all across the country, too, which I imagine creates challenges, especially in terms of getting advertisers.
Managing Editor, New Pathway Media Group
Yes, and it creates difficulties in our attempts to attract nationwide advertisers like the big multinationals, or at least nationwide companies. Yes, this is a smaller market. This is a niche market.
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
To what extent in that vein do you cover issues of the homeland versus your efforts to cover local Ukrainian community issues here in Canada? Could you comment on that?
Also, how have recent events in Ukraine, particularly the Russian aggression, the annexation of Crimea, and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine and the invasion there affected the role that you play, the demands on you, and the interests of readers?
Managing Editor, New Pathway Media Group
This all creates the need to cover basically everything—from the geopolitical issues to the tiniest community issues that we have here in Toronto or elsewhere in the Ukrainian community. It creates a positive in this respect, in that it broadens the range of issues we need to cover. On the other hand, it has been said a couple of times today that it's difficult to do because, due to the lack of funding, we cannot afford large editorial teams—if any, at times. Sometimes these papers are basically one-man bands, and it's very difficult to provide quality coverage of very different issues.
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
What changes would we have seen over the years in the number of Ukrainian print publications serving the Canadian Ukrainian community?
Managing Editor, New Pathway Media Group
I think the bulk of closures happened probably before the digital media came. Still, in our particular case, in the case of our community, we have not seen a lot of closures of the older newspapers.
That being said, their economic situation is not getting better, to put it softly. I'm afraid we might see, in community media as a whole, the withdrawal or reduction of support from our long-term supporters, going forward.
Conservative
Peter Van Loan Conservative York—Simcoe, ON
It's certainly been the pattern in a lot of the ethnic communities. For example, a lot of those who came here in the wake of World War II had a diversity of publications, and were fairly strong in those early years.
As people become more and more integrated into the Canadian population over time, the population gets older, and the subsequent generations get less attached to the community. You see closures and consolidations and mergers, with fewer and fewer publications, and less frequency.
Is that a pattern you see, or has the wave of recent post-1991 immigration helped stave that off a bit?
